1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable terminal, and more particularly, to a memory card mounting device for mounting an external memory card in a portable terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, external memory cards are used to increase the storage capacity of an electronic terminal such as a mobile terminal, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), a digital camera, etc., and they are classified according to size and standard into a variety of formats including Secure Digital (SD), Multimedia Card (MMC), Compact Flash (CF), and memory stick.
Portable terminals can store downloaded multimedia files or files created by photographing in their internal memories. However, the built in memories have limited capacities, and also sharing of stored information with other devices is difficult to achieve unless the terminals are provided with a separate connection device. Moreover, as the quality of multimedia files and the performance of a photographing device has been improved in recent years, there is a need for increasing the storage capacity of the portable terminal.
A portable terminal is typically equipped with a socket for mounting an external memory card, and a micro SD card suitable for a miniaturized device such as a widely used mobile communication terminal. The common use of such a memory card mounting device as a socket and an improved-integration of external memory card increased the utilization of the portable terminal and improved the sharing of information stored in the portable terminal.
In case of a cellular phone, the terminal is evermore miniaturized with the development of more sophisticated electronic/communication technologies, while the size of a display device is increasing. However, the size of information stored in the terminal sharply increases with the enhancement of a multimedia file reproduction function and camera performance.
Although the storage capacity of a memory card is also increasing owing to the improvement in the integration of the memory card, there is still a limitation in accommodating such a card. Although much effort has been made to increase the number of sockets for memory card mounting, this type of mounting has drawbacks especially as the phone is becoming smaller and slimmer.